The economy is in a downturn and your IT budget is cut and now management is asking you to come up with ideas on how to save money and increase the business’s productivity. There a number of proven initiatives you can undertake and there are some newer ones you might be looking at to get the most benefit, but they all impact performance of applications over the WAN and that means that you need a WAN Optimization solution that can meet the challenge. Many organizations are consolidating file servers from the branch offices to the data center to reduce the number of underutilized servers and take advantage of server virtualization to get the most out of newer higher performing servers. Organizations are increasingly moving to Web-based applications to eliminate the need to install client software on the PC and to simplify application administration. A WAN Optimization solution helps in these cases by providing caching and compression to speed file transfers and acceleration for HTTP and SSL, but is that enough?

These days many organizations are finding that they have to go beyond the basics to get the cost savings and productivity gains that they are looking for. Employees are increasing their use of video over the WAN and many of them are on the road and need a mobile solution and there is still a need to deliver branch office services such as DNS and DHCP while at the same time the workload to provide desktop support keeps increasing. A WAN Optimization solution that meets the challenge has to mitigate the impact of video over the WAN, to provide a solution for mobile workers, deliver local services in the branch office and it has to enable you to deploy services like VDI to bring down desktop support costs. A video solution should use just one stream over the WAN and provide for multiple streams at branch office. A good mobile solution should be optimized for the low-bandwidth, high-congestion links and the inefficiencies of TCP connections on networks with high packet loss that mobile workers experience. A solution for delivering local services to the branch office should not require additional equipment in the branch, while a solution for VDI should allow you to support increasing number of users while maintaining application performance. The Cisco WAAS solution has evolved to meet changing customer requirements. To read more about how WAAS meets the application acceleration challenge see this Whitepaper

1 Comments.

Nicely put, and all valid comments. I am presently editing a series of articles that focuses on these same issues and concerns with WAN optimization - first dispatch posted this week on the site (www.searchenterprisewan.com). Subsequent pieces will focus on deployment/installation issues and what you have to consider after the optimization solution is up and running (continuous monitoring, watching user habits, new apps, etc.) Knowledge is not only power, it is corporate survival.Tim

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